False, if you see @nermai's profile page (linkyou'll see that she joined in 2014 and has enough gold to buy 22 small animated banners and 2 large animated banners. That means that if you don't contribute or your contributions are not good/popular then you'll never earn more gold even if you created your account in 1950...over a year ago

Plus the F4 already explained why the animated banners are more expensive: "yes, they are high. Unfortunately, animated banners actually seem to slow down people's computers quite a bit since the browsers need to work extra hard. Loading times also slow down. We wanted to have it as an option, but we can't have everyone running a massive 15 megabyte banner, at least not until we roll out Rose Colored Glasses, so the best option was to make it expensive to make it uncommon".over a year ago